Following viruses using 'Digital Epidemiology'

Join Connor Bamford and Andrew Shaw for this week’s episode where we’re thinking bigger than we have before this series. Think about how influenza virus and similar viruses like varicella zoster virus - or the chickenpox virus- behave on the global scale.

In this episode we're joined by Dr Kevin Bakker, a postdoc in the lab of Dr Daniel Streicker here in Glasgow who currently works on how vampire bat rabies spreads between animals.

You might remember Kevin from an earlier episode where he and Daniel explained to us all about their work on vaccinating vampire bats against rabies virus. But today Kevin talks about some of his earlier work during his PhD at the University of Michigan on finding patterns in how viruses infect people and populations around the world using something called digital epidemiology with tools like Google trends. This analysis revealed a pattern dependent on the mating schedules of humans.

Kevin also has a particularly noteworthy career path that he’ll tell us about.